The Top Issues Identified by GTMetrix
Thankfully these page speed checkers give us lots of helpful information these days, but it’s not always easy to understand what they mean. That’s why we’re here to help interpret them.
One huge glaring issue was the first item on the list – a 19.4 MB image! This is 100x larger than any website image needs to be in order to be clear.
Other things on this initial list included:
Optimizing fonts.
Other large images.
A recommendation to use a caching plugin to “reduce initial server response time” and “serve static assets”.
Note that GTMetrix isn’t testing the website from China, but it’s review is useful for making the site faster overall. One thing that was not on GTMetrix’s list, but still important for keeping a WordPress website fast in China, is to avoid loading resources that might get blocked or throttled by The Great Firewall of China.
Top issues on GTMetrx's list
Step #1 – Shrink Images
“Working/designing for the web is completely different from print materials. For example, if I’m printing an advertisement that will be used to give people in their actual hands, I want that image quality resolution to be the highest I can possibly make it so the reader can clearly see what I’m promoting and hopefully take action.
If we did the same thing for a website, it would lead to extremey large philippine number for whatsapp image files, which would load very slowly. Want your site to be fast? Make sure your images have a small file size.
Of course, we can’t reduce image file sizes to the absolute minimum either, because then they wouldn’t be clear. So we need images that are the right size. In general, it’s a good idea to keep all images under 150 KB file size.” – Daniel
For this case, we used Photoshop to decrease the sizes of images on the homepage.
Here’s a before-and-after comparison for that one super-large image on the site.
Before (19.4 MB)super-large image on the site